The Personal Responsibility and Work Reconciliation Act Research Paper

The Personal Responsibility and Work Reconciliation Act - Research Paper Example This essay discusses that the current gender gap is not because women are less skilled than men but because now women demonstrate a higher propensity to attend college than men. Inequality in pay is due to the high extent of women’s segregation because of the nature of jobs. Hence, it can be said that women are now increasingly involved in competing with men in the job market. It is now required to eliminate the gender pay disparity because if single working mothers start earning as much as men there will be an increase of about 18 percent in the family income and the poverty will be reduced considerably. Major reforms relative to PRWORA have been in welfare fields such as housing, health care, child care and food. The federal government has allocated larger budgets for child care programs, which is evident from the fact that federal funding for child care has increased by almost 100 percent since the PRWORA was implemented. But some problems remain such as only about 12 perce nt of eligible households receive financial help under provisions of the Child Care and Development Fund. All families are not able to get benefits of state and federal schemes relative to child care, while tax exemptions continue to be meager in assisting families to adequately meet childcare costs. Additionally, the quality of child care is still poor because child care workers continue to be paid less. Even though there has been enhanced funding by the federal government in regard to child care, the pay of childcare workers has been stagnating.... Consequently, the outcomes of the PRWORA have been disputed and political campaigners have claimed either total success or failure depending upon their affiliations. At the same time, some facts cannot be denied such as the drop in volumes by about fifty percent in welfare relative to AFDC and TANF in spite of the several provisions that extended benefits external to the given rules. According to Boushey (2011), it is now evident that most of the former welfare recipients do not have work and those that are working earn between $6 and $8 per hour, which is too meager to sustain a family. The extent of poverty has increased amongst working families despite the decline in over all poverty rates. Families headed by single working mothers are the worst effected in this regard. Moreover, poverty has become more severe during the last many years for families that were already in deep poverty. Many families that were receiving welfare prior to the implementation of PRWORA are likely to expe rience greater hardships after they leave welfare. Over 33 percent of families getting welfare experienced situations when they were unable to get adequate food and the required medical care as compared to the position prior to the introduction of PRWORA. Families having one full time worker stood just a little less chance of experiencing one or more of such difficulties in comparison with the present welfare families. Almost 25 percent of families that became ineligible for welfare and had a single earning member went without adequate food, housing and the essential medical facilities. Most of the objectives of PRWORA pertained to addressing the high rate of single parenthood amongst poor households. It